In recent years, the retention of teachers and support for a viable leadership pipeline have been identified as two significant challenges faced by schools and systems in many countries. According to a recent OECD (2024) report, 47% of the school principals state that teacher shortages are hindering the quality of teaching and learning in their schools. In Australia, it is reported that over 70% of teachers do not intend to stay in the profession until retirement age (Longmuir et al., 2022). We also know there is difficulty attracting suitable candidates into principalship (Heffernan & Pierpoint, 2022).   Despite the urgency around retention and leadership pipelines little is known about teachers’ career pathways.

The current empirical evidence on career patterns of teachers and leaders is minimal. The data is often limited to course-grain information such as pay scale data with little acknowledgement of middle leadership roles and no nuanced understanding of transitional pathways. It is often assumed that teachers follow a career path where roles are linear and path dependent, and each position (or role) is considered necessary to perform in subsequent positions. At this point in time there is lack of research evidence focussed on how teachers navigate their careers, including how often they move between schools, any career breaks, the types and duration of leadership roles undertaken, and if they have participated in any further study.

The two research questions which frame this study are:

1.     How can a framework be built to map the career trajectories of teachers and leaders?

2.     What are the key factors influencing teachers’ career pathways?

The theoretical foundations of this study are informed by career development theories (e.g. Hall, 2018; Rodrigues, et al., 2021; De Vos & Van der Heijden, 2017). In broad terms these theories contribute to an understanding of how people choose, develop and progress in their careers.   Additionally, various researchers have studied career transitions, mostly focussed on specific one-off transitions such as school to work (e.g. Blokker et al., 2023) or work to retirement (e.g. Wang & Shi, 2014). Other scholarly work has focused on the complex and dynamic nature of career trajectories.  Biemann et al. (2012) emphasizes the importance of understanding the interplay between individual and contextual factors in shaping career trajectories.

When specifically considering career pathways in the education sector the seminal work of Huberman (1989) describes the career cycle of teachers.  Building on this work, Day and Gu (2010) introduce a broad framework to describe the various career stages of teachers. Additional studies have examined a range of factors that may influencing career progression, such as qualifications, experience, leadership roles, and professional development opportunities (see Montecinos et al., 2022; Murphy, 2020). More recently, the research focus has shifted to describing the current teaching crisis and how to retain teachers (Booth et al., 2021; Perryman & Calvert, 2020; See et al., 2020). However, these previous studies have not provided a comprehensive understanding of the diverse career paths and transitions that exist (at a fine-grained level).

This mixed methods study presents a novel methodological approach to analyse the diverse career trajectories and pathways of professionals in the field of education. This project draws on two forms of data. Firstly, in March 2024 an anonymous online survey was distributed to Australian teachers via social media platforms inviting them to provide details on every year of their career as educators. In a 6-week period over 900 teacher responses enabled the collection of trace data on a range of factors including any leadership roles, any part time, career breaks or further study undertaken, school location (city or rural) and school governance (government or non-government). Secondly, semi-structured interviews with 30 of those teachers surveyed were conducted. During the interviews, the participants were invited to share their career journey. The participants were asked to identify the factors which they perceive have supported or inhibited their career pathway, any studies undertaken, to outline their career aspirations and advice they might offer to others. The quantitative analysis involves the construction of career sequences for individual teachers spanning their various roles, transitions, and critical junctures based on the ‘trace data’ captured in the survey responses. Optimal Matching Analysis, a specific type of sequence analysis, was used to identify distinct career patterns and common pathways. This approach recognises the timing, order, and duration of teaching/leadership roles enabling the identification of clusters or typologies of career pathways. We then introduced network analysis for the visualisation and analysis of interconnections between various career stages. The network dashboard can be used to easily identify central nodes (e.g., positions or roles) that act as hubs or gateways for career transitions, as well as the detection of potential bottlenecks or barriers to career mobility. Finally, Markov chain analysis was employed to investigate the probabilities of transitioning between different career states. This analytical technique can be used as a simulation framework to investigate ‘what if’ style questions exploring specific career paths trajectories and perturbations. The qualitative analysis of the transcripts of interviews were coded according to the Miles and Huberman (1984) framework. The first stage involved the interviews being coded independently by two researchers for intercoder reliability. In the second stage, the key themes identified by each researcher were presented to glean the similarity and differences between the findings across the two researchers. Quotes to illustrate the findings were selected as representative of these themes.

This mixed-methods study describes the complex, non-linear, and dynamic nature of the career paths of teachers. By focussing on both the career trajectory of individuals and groups of teachers, we have a data set (and a methodology) that provides a framework to identify common pathways or clusters as well as anomalies. Importantly, our analysis captures the nuances and personal narratives that shape career decisions and perceptions. One illustrative example is based on the geographical location of schools. What is clear from our study is that those teachers who commence their teaching career in a rural school typically have a different career trajectory to those teachers in metropolitan schools. We have also identified significant differences in the career trajectory of teachers according to their governance structures (i.e. government schools compared to non-government schools) and according to gender. The interactive dashboard for network analysis provides an interface for systems and policy makers to interrogate career trajectory data. In addition, it is possible to explore what might happen to the career trajectory of individuals (or cohorts with particular characteristic/demographics) if changes or interventions are applied at different stages of a teacher’s career. For example, what might happen to career pathways to principalship if more part time leadership positions are available. Furthermore, the data from this study outlines the trends and identify the tension points, particularly where teachers choose to stay or leave the profession and if and when they transition into leadership positions. Specifically, this study provides a much-needed evidence base to support a solution to the important practical problem of teacher and leader shortages.

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